


Day I Know Everything?

by kscribbles



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Het, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-09
Updated: 2012-09-09
Packaged: 2017-11-13 20:53:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/507617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kscribbles/pseuds/kscribbles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oh Rose, youre a wonderful teacher.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Day I Know Everything?

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the livejournal fic competition, writerinatardis's last challenge; the prompt was _Rose teaches the Doctor something_. This is the director's cut. Many thanks to missperkigoth and momo, for helping me wrestle with this extended remix. Written in 2009.

It’s late, and he’s still tinkering with their small but growing TARDIS in the shed in the garden they’ve dubbed his workshop. But it’s been a few hours since he’s seen Rose, and that makes him, well… a bit twitchy.

He knows she’s still awake. Even in the cold of winter, she’d have come out to say goodnight, or at the very least buzzed him on the mobile she forced him to carry at almost all times. He heads back into what he thinks of as the Tyler compound, as well guarded as it is for their protection and comfort (which makes whisking Rose away for clandestine adventures not always easy for them), and finds her sitting alone near the Christmas tree in the front room.

The tree looks oddly bare without its heaps of presents sitting beneath it. They’d all ripped through them a few days ago. But the white fairy lights cast the room–and Rose herself–in a lovely warm glow. She’s bent over something he can’t quite see as he approaches her.

“What are you doing?” he asks, startling her only slightly.

She turns to him and gives him a soft smile as he sits next to her on the couch. She holds up what she’s been working on. “Making booties,” she answers. At his questioning look she continues, “For the baby.”

“For the _what_? What baby?” The memory of another time she’d told him about a baby flashes through his mind, but he discards all thoughts of that beach away. She couldn’t mean that she–?

“Mum’s? Due in June, she told us earlier at… Oh, you weren’t listening.” No, he’d probably been computing in his head. Working out the equations necessary to keep their TARDIS’s growth rate steady took a frustrating amount of his time, and apparently, attention.

She sighs that special sigh of hers that means he’s failed at something fairly simple. They were getting fewer and further in between as he adjusted to day to day life in one place, and they were as often underwritten with ‘you are so adorable’ as they were with her frustration, but he still hated to be the cause of them.

All this, though, he wasn’t considering at the moment with anything but the far back of his mind. Mostly he was still stuck on the word ‘baby’. She said it was her mum’s?

His face must still be conveying his shock (shock, definitely not panic, right?) because Rose suddenly looks affronted.

“What, she’s not _that_ old!” she says in her mother’s defence.

“No… that isn’t it. I…”

“Oh.” Realisation dawns on her face. “You thought it was mine.” She lets out a short laugh. “Don’t worry, you’re safe. For now. Your panicking is adorable, though.”

Ah, adorable, that’s good. He’s back in the plus column.

“I wasn’t–” oh, yes, he completely was. Best distract her entirely from that line of discussion. “Show me how to knit,” he says, indicating what she’s still got in her hands.

“You don’t know?” She sounds surprised.

“Of course it’s… like weaving, but even less efficient.” Was that rude? He was still doing that after months here, insulting humans when he was, for the most part, one of them. He tried to qualify by admitting his own ignorance. “I know in principle, but not in practise.” Then he adds softly, “Show me?”

“Seriously, you want me to teach you to knit?”

“Said so, didn’t I?”

She studies his face for a moment, sees that he’s indeed serious and sets down her own work on top of the paper at the other side of her which seems to be a pattern for the booties. She reaches into a box at her feet and draws out a pair of thick needles and some blue yarn. “Ok, but we’re starting with a scarf.”

“Brilliant, I like scarves.”

He gives her a huge smile and she returns it in kind, so he leans forward and kisses her briefly. It’s been far too long since he’s kissed her, really. Hours, at least.

He pulls away and brings a knee up on the couch to sit facing her. He slides his glasses on and she proceeds to show him how to start the project on one needle and then demonstrates the simplest knit stitch a few times for him. He watches her hands move, enraptured. She’s very deft with them, though it seems a bit difficult for her to slow the process down for his benefit. The irony’s not lost on him–that Rose is, as she has had to be several times recently, the one who has to slow down and explain things to _him_.

His single heart swells, as happens at least a few times a day, with love for her.

“Doctor?” Her soft voice draws him from his reverie.

“Hmm?”

“You wanna have a go?” She proffers the beginnings of the scarf to him.

“Sure. Yes, of course.” He takes the needles from her and they feel oddly awkward in his hands. He’s so comfortable with wires and machinery and the bits and bobs of technology that he’s always working with, but these two metal sticks and some string, he’s not even sure how to hold.

She places her hands over his and adjusts his grip. “There,” she says gently. “Go ahead,” she prompts after a moment, when he does nothing but stare at his hands.

He makes a tentative movement, recalling what he’s seen her do. She patiently corrects where he’s stuck the needle, how he’s wrapped the yarn. Another attempt and he almost creates a hole in the barely-begun garment by losing a stitch. She saves it and shows him again, her voice soothing and encouraging and keeping him from throwing the whole thing to the floor in frustration.

By halfway through the row, he seems to figure it out. He visualizes the path of the yarn around the needles and interlocking with itself to create a uniform fabric and his hands begin to move almost of their own accord.

“Oh, Rose,” he says as he enthusiastically starts the next row, “you’re a wonderful teacher.”

She laughs beside him, but is otherwise silent as he continues at his task. Several rows later, he’s concentrating intently on evening out the spatial ratio between the stitches, when he feels her fingers at his temple.

He looks up and she appears fuzzy for a moment because she is removing his glasses from his face. His vision clears and he sees her eyes are wide and dark, looking at him as fixedly as he was the knitting a moment ago. He begins to question her when she speaks, her voice uneven.

“Sorry, it’s just that… your tongue, against your teeth like that. It’s very sexy.”

“Is it?” He’s not teasing her at all, but genuinely curious. He hadn’t realised he’d been doing it.

She murmurs assent absently.

He sees her intent just in time to shove the needles from between them and onto the floor–thus preventing a very unsexy stab to anyone’s gut–a split second before she’s hauling him to her and attacking his lips with hers.

Relief to a tension he hadn’t entirely realised he’d been carrying floods him as he responds eagerly to her kiss. It’s been what, 25 entire hours since he’s felt the slide of her tongue against his? Far too long for his comfort.

More items are shoved off the couch as she tugs his body over hers and pulls at his clothes. She works his shirt out of his trousers and her warm hands on the skin of his back elicit a low groan from him that sounds incredibly loud to him in the quiet of the house at night. He reluctantly pulls back despite her whimpered protest.

All is still as he listens over their combined panting for any sign that they’ve awoken anyone.

After a moment, when he’s caught his breath, he asks, “Do you think we could move upstairs? I don’t fancy your newly hormonal mum threatening to mince any parts of me with that new set of kitchen knives she received for Christmas.”

She giggles and quickly shoves him off her, not even pausing for a second before half-running for the stairs.

> > >

A rhythmic metallic clicking pulls her from her slumber. She stretches, enjoying the slide of the sheets against her skin as her senses filter in more information bit by bit. The clicking has been going on for some time. The Doctor is in bed beside her. It’s not quite morning, but the lights are on.

She sits up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, and looks to her right.

He’s half-covered by the duvet, naked from the waist up. Except for his glasses and a long blue scarf draped over his neck. Three pairs of knitted booties in different sizes are strewn over his legs.

She watches in fascination at his hands moving at an incredible speed on his latest project. Her first thought _not_ relating to what they’d been doing before she fell asleep is about when he might have gone back downstairs for the knitting supplies. The second is, _That’s not a bootie_.

He looks at her, not even breaking his rhythm with the needles, and speaks before she even has a chance to open her mouth.

“What do you think?” he asks. “She’s small yet, not much bigger than a football, and not quite sentient, but I’m not sure how she perceives the cold out there in the shed, so…” He trails off.

She blinks at the oddly shaped item in his hands, not really understanding. “What… is it?”

“Rose,” he says as if it’s perfectly obvious. “It’s a TARDIS cosy.”

 

 

FIN

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